Toronto-based indie band Born Ruffians tumble into town tonight (March 20), bringing its twitchy and twirling tunes to Vancouver’s Fortune Sound Club.

The band is on the road to promote Birthmarks, the long-awaited and soon-to-be released new full-length due out April 16 on Paper Bag Records in Canada and Yep Roc Records in the US.

The much-anticipated new recordtook three years of writing, rehearsing and recording to come to fruition. Why so long? As lead singer and guitarist Luke Lalonde admits, the band felt rushed while recording its 2010 sophomore album Say It. This time around, Lalonde and bandmates Mitch Derosier (bass), Steven Hamelin (drums), and Andy Lloyd (keys/guitar) wanted to avoid that stressful rush and worked, instead, without a deadline.

“It just kind of worked out that way,” Lalonde says over the phone from Toronto where the band is making final preparations to hit the road. “We planned on making sure that we got it right, but we didn’t plan on taking three years.

“On the other two records it always came down, very quickly, to, ‘shit, we need to get this done.’ As soon as you get into that mode, it’s really hard to do something that you’re going to be happy with. This time we just didn’t have that, and that made it way more fun.”

The band also wanted to capture a certain element from their debut LP Red, Yellow and Blue that seemed to be missing on the sophomore effort.

“When we lived in Midland, we would just practice together all the time,” Lalonde says. “And then when we moved to Toronto we all lived together, and then everybody moved out. So [Say It] was written in just rehearsal spaces and stuff.”

In order to facilitate an environment more conducive to writing music, the band headed to rural Stratford, Ontario where they rented an old farm house in the Spring of 2011 and again in the Fall of that same year.

“The main goal was to get back into the vibe of a band that lives together,” Lalonde explains. “We wanted a place where we could sleep and play anytime we wanted to, where we could just be there writing music and not have any other distractions. Basically, it was just getting into that vibe. When you’re all living together, just hanging out, drinking beer and playing music, you tend to write a lot more. And it gives you more freedom in writing, instead of being like, ‘we have this place Monday, Wednesday and Thursday from 11 to 3,’ and you have to sort of schedule in your creativity. That’s just not conducive to writing music, I don’t think.”

For 2012, Born Ruffians spent sporadic chunks of time recording at Boombox Sound with producer Roger Leavens, tweaking some tunes, radically changing others, and even writing a few fresh ones until, finally, the band felt satisfied. And while fans of this quirky outfit wait to here what all that time writing, rehearsing and recording has birthed, Lalonde, for one, is pleasantly comfortable with the record.

“So far, it’s just way more listenable to me,” the singer says, comparing the new album with older efforts. “I can still listen to it and not cringe, like, ‘I wish we could have done this or that,’ there are way fewer of those things on this record and we’re really very satisfied with it for the most part.”

I have to agree. While I didn’t find Say It unbearable by any means, it certainly did not live up to the standard set by Red, Yellow and Blue. This new record, however, creates its own, new standard, with crisper and cleaner production (the first thing one is likely to notice about the new album) and songs that sound much more realized.

Those things that make Born Ruffians instantly recognizable, Lalonde’s inventive melodies, the staccato guitar stabs, dancing bass lines and disjointed rhythms remain. Birthmarks, with the benefits of patience and a careful, considerate ear, is simply seasoned differently.

Fans of Born Ruffians, or anyone interested in seeing a great concert, can get a live dose of Birthmarks tonight at Fortune Sound Club. Check out current Birthmarks single “Needle” below.

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